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Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is a magical adventure that no PS3 owner should miss.

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is simply magical. It's been a long time since I was so enchanted and entranced by a game---and I've only just rescued the Great Sage's daughter.

The cell-shaded animation makes you feel almost as though you were in a cartoon, and the game's sterling story and excellent voice-acting (though much of the dialogue is simply text) makes the experience fantastically immersive. Wandering through lush forests or across sweeping deserts, one can't help but feel a sense of awe.

This is the first game I can remember in which I find myself as enraptured by the story as I am by the gameplay. I'm often impatient to be on to the next fight or the next puzzle; in Wrath of the White Witch I'm impatient to be done with the fighting and on to the next poor soul whose heart needs mending.

This brings up my one complaint with the game. Oddly enough, I find the frequency of the battles a bit over the top. Since many of the fights are actually not that hard, and since you have to cut to each of them, it can get a bit tedious at times.

Of course, the harder fights, and especially some of the boss fights, are marvelous fun.

Grabbing up health and magic globes, defending against powerful attacks just in time, and choosing which familiar to use at any given moment, makes for strategic, fast-paced battles. It's sort of a melding of turn-based and real-time combat that's really a lot of fun, especially as you level up your familiars (and yes, I've been playing a lot of Persona 4 Golden and I keep wanting to refer to these as Personas rather than familiars. In many ways they serve the same function in both games, though combat is structured quite differently.)

The story itself is as delightful as the animation.

You play as a young boy, Oliver, whose life takes a tragic turn early on in the game. Soon you are introduced to Drippy, The Lord High Lord of the Fairies---he's not your average fairy either.

Impatient, brash, and speaking in something of a Scottish brogue, Drippy is both adviser and sidekick to Oliver. His hard exterior is punctuated with his physical merriness; he dances and twirls and falls, only to get right back up again, offering in turn words of encouragement and light-hearted disdain. And he has a lantern pierced through his long, yellow nose.

Indeed, as Oliver tells him later in the game, one of your familiars looks more like he imagined a fairy to be than the Lord High Lord of the Fairies himself.

The story is one of parallel worlds, dodging back and forth between a magical realm under the blight of a terrible curse and the town of Motorville---a 1950s landscape of white-picket fences and shiny, colorful cars. Soul Mates exist across the two worlds, mirror images of people and animals in both locations. This is key to the game's story and to many of its quests.

In Drippy's world, the evil Shadar has driven magic away.

He's also waged a war on joy and happiness, stealing pieces of hearts from the people and animal-people who inhabit the world, leaving them under the spell of broken hearts. As a wizard and the Pure-Hearted One, it is Oliver's task to set things right. And so the game is one of mending what's broken, and piecing together the hearts of the forlorn, whether they're simple town guards or His Meowjesty King Tom.

It's a sweet story, a fairy tale, but it's never cheesy or cloying; it's humorous, but its humor is never cheap. Even the puns and plays off old fairy tales (the city of Ding Dong Dell, for instance, or the villainous mouse king Hickory Dock) feel fresh. This is not a Shrek fairy tale, but something much deeper and more gripping.

The music, composed by Joe Hisaishi, is what rounds off all this beauty. It's at once lush and catchy, with hooks destined to be video game classics. I find myself humming these melodies long after the game has been turned off, and I've wandered back into my own Motorville.

Of course, the game may not be every gamer's first choice. It's very story-driven, and you'll spend a lot of time reading or listening to dialogue, and watching as the game plays out before your eyes. Fortunately, the story itself is strong enough to make this worth my while, even as someone who often complains about this very thing.

The role-playing elements are not the deepest I've seen, but they're still engaging enough to keep things interesting. Managing familiars as they level and gear up, not to mention the catalog of spells at your fingertips, makes for a game that can be enjoyed by a wide demographic.

Ni No Kuni: Wrath of the White Witch is one of those games you never want to stop playing. Its sweetness and character stands in stark contrast to many of today's "edgy" or "gritty" games (though all these certainly have their place) and in this sense, it's very welcome, much in the way Journey was welcome for its absence of combat. Sometimes, games can be uplifting and joyful, and this is one of those times.

Level-5 and Namco Bandai have given the Sony PlayStation 3 its first really must-play exclusive for 2013.